A Return to Veganism (Take Two)

So I sat down to write a post that rapidly was becoming an autobiography of eating. A few paragraphs in I was starting to bore the hell out of myself. The whole epic was really meant as a contextualized introduction to the announcement, that in April I returned to veganism.

The long and short of it is that I go in and out of phases of thinking about what I eat. After managing to stay vegan in college, in Australia, and on a 10 week road trip around these grand ‘ol omnivorous United States, I went back to just being just vegetarian shortly after we moved to Tucson. The truth is I got kinda lazy. I ate cheese, I watched TV, I drove a car to work, I wasted time. And perhaps I needed these years of fallow time to just rest up and eventually bore myself back into thinking about the choices I make.

A few months ago I read this article in the UU World. It more or less reminded me of all my reasons for going vegetarian when I was 12 and vegan when I was 19. I decided it was time for me to take a bit of a challenge back into my everyday life, and change how I eat.

This past week I have of course also been quitting smoking. It has been interesting (to say the least) to watch my desires for old comforts to emerge. Those of you who know me know that I bite my nails. I started biting my bails when I was six years old and my parents wanted me to stop sucking my thumb. So clearly I have a long history of replacing one comfort habit with another.

I’ve been kinda silent on this blog the last couple months. One excuse is of course being a puppy mom. Beyond that I think I’ve been in some sort of passively introspective cloud that had me worried about blogging. What is my own voice, I wondered. Why am I still so stuck in my own head when there are real things happening in the world? And why would I want to share my own revelations about mediocrity and depression on the web?

And eventually I realized that the real issue is that there are still huge conversations I’m not ready to have with myself. And that is the fear that has been keeping me dormant.

Towards the end of college I decided I wanted to be a minister when I grew up. By the summer after college I had made a short list of perspective seminaries (the same list I am still working with today). Yet I knew I wasn’t ready to pursue seminary yet, I didn’t feel together enough to embark on such an intense journey.

It might be time.

It might be time for me to care about what I eat and how it impacts my body and this world. It might be time for me to care about how I spend my time, how present I can be in relationships, at work, in joy and sorrow. It might be time for me to stop waiting for the perfect time and just forge ahead – raising my voice, even as I am learning to use it.

Vegan cupcakes take over my world

If you have been in communication with me over the last month you have probably noticed that I have been distracted by vegan cupcakes – making cupcakes, icing cupcakes, eating cupcakes, preparing ingredient shopping lists for cupcakes, and reading aloud from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

J. and I were given this wonderful book on New Years by friends in Philadelphia. That very night we discovered that cupcakes go very well with champagne. Since then I have made cupcakes for my youth group at church, cupcakes for friends and coworkers, and cupcakes for coffee hour. We’ve had dulce sin leche cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes with cookies and cream frosting, and vanilla cupcakes with lemon butter cream icing. Neighbors borrowed our new book and made chocolate stout cupcake, and I borrowed their pastry bag to have a go at the art of frosting cupcakes.

Joy was spread around the world.

This morning I was pleased to read an email from a friend with a link to the article Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism, a delightful NY Times piece on Moskowitz and Romero and their forays into a world of vegan baking that is both pretty and punk.

A quick internet search shows that we are indeed in the midst of a cupcake movement. There are gourmet cupcake bakeries and cafes opening from New York and Beverly Hills to Chicago, Pittsburgh and Sydney. There are sophisticated cupcakes, arty cupcakes, wedding cupcakes and even cupcake lawsuits. And of course, there are cupcake blogs, including vegancupcakes.wordpress.com, which means that my new favorite book has a companion narrative unfolding online.

Now what does the current cupcake craze look like? Magnolia Bakery in NYC, which opened over 10 years ago, markets the old fashioned cupcake. Yet this dessert venue stays open late into the night and weekend customers often wait in a line wrapping around the block. Citizen Cupcake in San Francisco pairs their desserts with cocktails. Cupcakes are clearly no longer a mere birthday ritual confined to the assigned seating of elementary school.

In a 2004 interview, James Gray, a cupcake baker from Dozen Cupcakes in Pittsburgh stated, “A cupcake becomes a blank canvas and it can be anything you want it to be.”

So, how do you like your cupcakes? I, like the authors of Vegan Cupcakes like my single serving desserts to be vegan and delicious. While some of the cupcake bakeries, such as Dozen Cupcakes, do feature a few vegan options much of the current cupcake craze still seems to center around butter, cream and eggs (sometimes organic). With so much energy currently being put into cupcake choice as a statement of identity, and so much flavor, creativity and style available in vegan cupcakes, why not have more on the menu?

And now, I think there might be one more cupcake waiting for me in the kitchen.